Introduction

In reviewing the literature in reception and audience studies over the last few decades, one is struck by a common distinction drawn by authors surveying the state of the field before them. In short, this distinction is often distilled to two signifiers, film studies and cultural studies, themselves meant to stand in for complex ways of conceptualizing the relationship between the media text and the viewer. Will Brooker and Deborah Jermyn describe this as

a journey in Film Studies, from the primacy of the “spectator” as a hypothetical subject position constructed by the filmic text, to an increasingly expansive recognition of the “audience,” as actual, empirical viewers belonging to distinct socio- historical contexts. This gradual shift in focus owes much to the more traditionally ethnographic approach of Cultural Studies, which was steadily accusing a seminal body of work on “real” audiences and their relationships with media texts over the same period. (Brooker and Jermyn 2003, 127)

Here Brooker and Jermyn offer an account of the field framed in terms initially laid out by Miriam Hansen some fifteen years earlier; she described the relationship between the “textually- constructed spectator” and the “empirical moviegoer” as the distinction between the “hypothetical point of address of the film as a discourse,” on the one hand, and the individual spectator, on the other (Hansen 1989).

Importantly, however, Hansen argued that we err in approaching these as discrete objects of study. Referring to the imagined spectator and the empirical moviegoer, she asserted that

positing these terms as distinct, alternative levels of argument seems to me symptomatic of the development of film studies as a discipline, of the increasing division of labor between film theory and film history. Not only do we need to conceptualize spectatorship as a process that mediates between the two levels, as a historically constituted and variable matrix; we also need to complicate the issue with a third term — one that accounts for the social, collective, experiential dimension of cinematic reception. (Hansen 1989, 169)